Memory failure - an experiment in recollecting adventure game plots

[GarageGothic]

This is a bit silly to post perhaps, but I found it an interesting exercise, and I thought perhaps others might find it fun or even feel like playing along and posting their memories of some other game.

So, a while back I took part in a forum discussion about The Longest Journey, and I suddenly realized that my memory of the game was very fragmented. So today, as a sort of clear-your-head writing exercise I decided to spend 15 minutes writing down everything I remembered about the game, including plot, characters, puzzles and whatever other details came to mind, and see if it made any sense (spoiler: It didn't really).

So, 8 years or so after I played the game, here's my take on what happened in The Longest Journey:

Spoiler

Teen girl April Ryan lives in a near-future sci-fi world called Stark. Wait, actually it starts off with April’s dream about a dragon and saving its egg by watering a talking tree. But then she wakes up in the real world, in a town or part of town called Venice.
April has a lesbian landlady who always sits around the living room and is way too willing to answer personal questions with sexual innuendo. There’s also some asshole who lives across the hall who’s always coming onto April. Outside the house there’s an old Hispanic hippie named Cortez, I guess he’s kinda like Sean Connery in Highlander.
April attends some art college where she’s working on a holographic sculpture of the dragon from her dreams. Then for some reason she has to go to a cinema and give a plain-clothes cop poisoned candy or something to get in. She also has to retrieve a key for an electrical box from the train tracks using an inflatable rubber duck, a clamp, a band-aid, and some other inventory-puzzly stuff. And she uses a talking police monkey toy to fool the cop behind the cinema.
Anyway, there’s this cinema and inside is Cortez who sends her into another world â€" though it has nothing to do with the movie on the screen like in Last Action Hero. Not sure what the point of the cinema was to be honest.
So she arrives in this Tolkien-esque fantasy world called Arcadia that turns out to be the place from her dreams. Right away this old guy, some sort of priest, tells her a legend about The Balance between the two worlds, Stark â€" the world of science, and Arcadia â€" a world of magic. It’s a really simple concept but he goes on for half an hour about it and you kinda humor him because he’s been waiting his whole life for “the chosen one” to arrive, so why not let him have his moment of glory.
There’s also a crazy old captain who has a crow in a trunk. He also talks for ages if you let him, but it doesn’t really add anything to the plot.
You also trick a guy in the market place by using your magnetic screwdriver to win a shell game or something (remember, anything scientific is considered “magic” in this world of magic, irony ftw). Somehow you end up with the captain’s crow as your sidekick â€" he talks a lot too and is supposed to provide comedy.
At some point in-between all this you return to Stark, and there’s a bit in an art gallery where some retarded kid has painted pictures from Arcadia. Cortez seems to think it’s important. Not sure why.
I must admit I don’t remember the continuity of all this, but you keep switching between Stark and Arcadia at least a couple of times throughout the game.
In arcadia you end up on a ship where there’s a barrel of apples, you visit the Ewok village, go to see some creepy witch (but even if it’s scary you can’t die, so no worries), meet some guy from Stark who knows Cortez, drinks a lot and rides a bike. You also visit a flooded library and read a ton of books about the history of Arcadia without knowing which ones are important. You also talk to some Shrek-lookalike guy who lives in a tree. And eventually you get to this castle in the air where a wizard called *Roper Klacks lives â€" he sends you through this M.C. Escher-like staircase room straight out of Labyrinth, and eventually you best him at magic by using a pocket calculator. No kidding.
Back in Stark there’s a ton of stuff going on that I don’t remember any context for. You go to a police station and use a cop’s glass eye to get past security, there’s a bit where you shake a can of soda in an industrial paint shaking machine to get rid of a cop in cyber armour, and there’s this dude who swears a lot. He’s some kind of hacker and he rides around in a flying-saucer-wheelchair kind of thing. Possibly you also go see a priest unless I’m confusing it with another game.
Then there’s a scene in a futuristic space airport where you find an empty pizza box. There’s a sequence aboard a spaceship with stereotypical Aliens/Doom 3 metal hallways, and eventually you get to the bad guy’s skyscraper and trick your way in with the pizza box.
Then you’re back in Arcadia walking through a surreal desert where April has some kind of weird flashback/psychotic  episode where she confronts her abusive father. And then she gets to some kind of tower where she thinks she’ll become The Guardian of the Balance but instead the bad guy’s henchman redeems himself by taking on the task of hovering inside a bright light for the next million years.
Then at the end we discover that the old lady telling the whole story was actually April as an old woman. Not that we hadn’t guessed â€" but always nice to have your suspicions confirmed.

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(Disclaimer: This is, by its very nature, a highly subjective view on the game. It's not a review of the game, and I have no wish to try to defend my views/interpretations - any opinions expressed are simply part of my memories of the game)

[SSH]

You've made me realise how much of TLJ I  have forgotten! And that I wasn't paying attention at the end becuase I thought:

Spoiler

April DID become the guardian of the balance

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[GarageGothic]

Check out the Wikipedia TLJ plot summary to really be blown away then. There are huge chunks of the game that I'd totally erased from memory, and some sequences I still draw a blank on even after reading about them.

I want to do a similar write-up of Grim Fandango when I get the time. That's another game where I have vivid images in my mind of many disparate parts, but few of them click together. For some reason it's always the second half of the games that are hazy with clarity only returning very close to the end sequence.

[evenwolf]

I think this has a lot to do with the detail oriented aspect of adventure games.   

You can remember more about shoot em up games because the objectives are so repetitive.   Bang bang bang.   Talk.  Bang bang bang.

[Anian]

You might have forgotten the whole:

Spoiler

dragons that are in Stark and Arcadia and basically all the guides and villians are the Kin. The balance is off and Chaos is starting to emerge and McAllen (I think) is trying to connect the two worlds

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But yeah, haven't played TLJ in quite a while so memory is a bit fuzzy, which is I guess good for replayability. And since Dreamfall is also in some scenes, it gets a bit mixed up.
I do remember that I first played the demo which was the part on the ship where you have to make the apples look rotten by throwing in a worm.

I don't remember a lot of motivation for the characters, that might be the lack of connection and understanding between flashes of memory.

[GarageGothic]

Anian:

Spoiler

Yeah, the whole thing with the dragons really didn't stick - only remember the one in the beginning. Same thing with the villains, didn't remember their motivation at all. When I read the wiki summary "Vanguard" definitely rang a bell, but that's about it. The entire underwater bit - nothing but a vague memory that I'm possibly mixing up with The Phantom Menace .

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[Dualnames]

I only recall of this:

Spoiler

APRIL WAS A LESBO

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[TerranRich]

Spoiler

She WAS!?!?

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Anyway, this is very interesting. I played TLJ once, years ago, and it's amazing how little of it I remember. Is it endemic only of certain games? Or pretty much any game we played years ago only a few times (or even once).

I've played Runaway 1 a total of, I think, 3 times. But I think the graphical and dialog style kind of stuck in my mind, so it's hard to forget most of it. TLJ was... I don't want to say bland, but definitely not as memorable as most other games.

[blueskirt]

Played it 12 years ago. What I remember...

Spoiler

You're this girl who find herself in this fantasy parallel universe only to find out it was just a dream, so you go to work in your sci-fi-ish huge city, at the end of your day, you can choose to go on this date or stay at work, whatever you do there's this weird vision of fantasy parallel universe that appears out of nowhere, the next day it get real wordy as you're investigating the vision and there's some adventuring needing to be done, I remember an artist painting in a studio, I remember getting stuck on a puzzle with the mechanical police officer toy, then I don't remember what happens next but you find yourself in this fantasy parallel universe for real this time, no dreams or visions, and it get even wordier as you can talk to every single citizens of the fantasy universe and their moms.

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And that's pretty much it. I stopped playing the game at that point because after I was done talking with everyone, I quit the game only to find out a couple days later that I forgot to save my game, and the prospect of talking with all those guys a second time did not interest me at all.

[LimpingFish]

All I can remember is...

Spoiler

My will to live evaporated somewhere around the middle of disc 2.

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[GarageGothic]

Is it endemic only of certain games? Or pretty much any game we played years ago only a few times (or even once).

I think our brains are quite good at sorting and reducing information by relevance - sometimes a bit too efficiently (e.g. stereotyping by difference without regard to individual uniqueness - the "all Asians look alike" syndrome). I'm not really into fantasy fiction, so a lot of the plot/world elements of TLJ simply were placed on the generic D&D/Tolkien shelf. Notice how I keep referring to other fictional universes like Labyrinth or Star Wars? Those references weren't meant to say "what a rip-off", but to suggest that those scenes are grouped very closely or even interconnected in my memory. I'm surprised that I failed to mention Neil Gaiman, because most of all TLJ reminded me of the Sandman comic A Game of You.

Another thing this exercise made me wonder about, is whether adventure games, or any game where the levels are spatially related to each other, work in the same way as memory palaces and help us remember details and sequences of events better than, say, a movie or a book. The way I've structured the recollection of the early parts of the game is a pretty obvious room-by-room stroll through the game world, but whenever there's some sort of transition that's not directly based on room geography (shifts between Stark/Arcadia, space travel, shipwreck etc.) my memory gets confused. Same thing with the Runaway games, I really can't retell any of those games in a coherent fashion because even though they were mostly linear they jumped all over the place.

[m0ds]

Nice thread. REgarding the theme - just tonight my friend was telling me about his new MI2 Special Edition (2) download from Steam and I was getting all confused over the storylines, and it turned out to be SOMI (special edition...2?) or something. I'm still confused. But I kept confusing storyline from 2 with 1. But the fact is, it happens. This is why it's great to rewatch a film a few years later and not too often in between, because our memory of it becomes fragmented, and we feel the need to restructure it Good topic GG! The psycology behind it intrigues me most.

[evenwolf]

I was getting all confused over the storylines, and it turned out to be SOMI (special edition...2?) or something. I'm still confused. But I kept confusing storyline from 2 with 1.

Mods, if you continue to feel confused I found this great website that briefly explains what happens in both games:

http://tinyurl.com/allthings1

It wraps everything up in a nice big bow and never repeats itself.